Since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, the RPF-led government in Rwanda has had to deal with hostile attitudes across the world in general and the western world in particular. The most notable amongst these attitudes have contended that Rwanda is either still a failed country or one on the verge of collapsing and therefore it needs saving. The proponents of these views have engaged in a ‘holy’ mission to find a savior for Rwanda, a ‘hero’ is anointed by the western world and is deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize. But because the premises that prompted the quest for a hero aren’t grounded in reality, the narrative promoted by the likes of Anjan Sundaram has had no relation with facts; it’s a distortion of information and outright lies that aim to justify their regime change agenda. Indeed, Anjan Sundaram’s article in Foreign Policy is yet another piece of fiction that defies reason. Sundaram sets the ground for his fiction by claiming that “Rusesabagina said he ‘woke up’ in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where officials confirmed his arrest.” Yet the exact words of Rusesabagina in his interview with the New York Times (NYT) contradict Sundaram’s distorted version. “Until the time when I landed, I thought I was landing in Bujumbura” Rusesabagina said, confirming that he was conscious and awake but not knowledgeable enough to differentiate the International Airport of Kigali from Bujumbura’s airport. Moreover, Rusesabagina’s account - on how he voluntarily boarded a plane in Dubai that he believed was bound for Burundi - defeats the different versions of kidnapping peddled by Sundaram and his propaganda partners. Secondly, Sundaram proceeds to disparage the ongoing judicial process taking place in Rwanda on the fallacious grounds that Rusesabagina was denied legal representation of his choosing and, as a result, has begun to incriminate himself. For one thing, Rusesabagina is being represented by a reputable lawyer of his choosing, Advocate Gatera Gashabana. On numerous occasions, the court adjourned hearings at the defendant’s requests, granting sufficient time to the terror suspect and his lawyer to consult and to coordinate their defense strategy. Moreover, Rusesabagina incriminated himself long before his arrest in different interviews with radios such as the BBC and the VOA, as well as in recordings published on the YouTube channel that promoted his terror movement, in which he claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks that claimed innocent lives in Southern Rwanda. The self-incriminating evidence comprises a recording in which he made his infamous call for war. Further, Rusesabagina has been trying, before and during his trial, to retract on those previous statements going as far as shamelessly affirming to the NYT that he does not remember recording himself. Evidently, and contrary to Sundaram’s lunacy that “Rusesabagina has begun to incriminate himself” as part of “a bargain he is forced to accept if he doesn’t want to end up dead”, the suspect has instead attempted to evade responsibility by arguing that he had never sent his henchmen on a mission to kill. Third, Sundaram should demonstrate that no law provides for the principle of reciprocity; or prove that a new law was enacted specifically for Rusesabagina instead of claiming that “rules have been changed” to prevent western lawyers from representing his ‘hero’. Nothing prevents, technologically, these self-appointed western representatives from consulting with Rusesabagina’s legally recognized lawyer to seek legal assistance on Rwandan law regarding the subject. Understandably, Sundaram’s mission to save his ‘hero’ from prosecution requires that he depicts Rwanda in the worst terms possible. The ‘savior’ of Rwanda must be understood and imagined in a context that reframes his terror activities as heroic actions. As such, Rwanda is no longer the country where millions of tourists from all over the world are granted visas on arrival. In Sundaram’s vivid and incoherent imagination, Rwanda is a country hostile to visitors, something akin to a hermetic nation such as North Korea where “Academics and reporters who have pursued such research [that would contradict Kagame’s propaganda] have had their families threatened in the United States and Canada and have required state-issued bodyguards”. To vilify the RPF-led government, and confident in the knowledge that newspapers such as the Foreign Policy wouldn’t bother with the most basic professional ethics and fact-checking of his outrageous allegations that are presented as facts, Sundaram promotes a genocide denier’s book, In Praise of Blood. This book outlandishly contends that the RPF, the liberation movement that stopped the genocide against the Tutsi, planned the genocide, triggered it, encouraged it, participated in it through infiltrations of his soldiers in the genocidal militias, all of this as a strategy to conquer power. The same book contends that the RPF committed another genocide against the Hutu. Evidently, Sundaram can get away with promoting genocide denialism and revisionism because the lives of Rwandans and, generally, those of blacks don’t matter. Otherwise, a serious newspaper would know that the so-called “double genocide hypothesis has been popularized by a few fringe academics, journalists, and members of a small and impotent Hutu Power clique” as highlighted by Susan Thompson, one of the fiercest North American academic ‘critics’ of Rwanda who, if Sundaram is to be believed, must be surrounded by bodyguards. Moreover, no serious western newspaper would allow the promotion of a similar book revising the Holocaust and alleging that the Jews infiltrated Nazi forces to exterminate their own people. Neither would any serious newspaper publish Sundaram’s grotesque allegations that the “World Bank and the IMF publishes the government’s figures without independently verifying them” as if Rwanda, unlike richer and more powerful countries, has s mysteriously magical influence over those powerful financial institutions. But perhaps, this mysterious influence would explain why Rwanda is the only country where, according to Sundaram, “Foreign diplomats and aid officials in Rwanda are afraid to criticize Kagame for fear of being expelled from Rwanda and having their extensive aid programs canceled.” In normal circumstances, aid is used as tool to threaten the recipient government. In Sundaram’s fiction, not only does Rwanda, the recipient country, threaten donors, but one of the donors’ greatest fear is that their aid could be rejected by the recipient country. Obviously, Sundaram’s world is upside down. How Foreign Policy allows Sundaram to turn its world upside down is what’s astonishing. But it is not just Sundaram’s world that is upside down. The entire ideological edifice around the quest to find a savior anointed by the West is built on the rejection of a disturbing reality for many in the western world. It is built on the need to repair what is perceived as an abnormality in the world order: the fact that Africans saved themselves from being wiped out by genocide without western help. As long as this ‘abnormality’ is not repaired, Rwanda will continue to be depicted as either a failed country or one on the verge of collapsing. Ironically, those like Sundaram who pretend to be concerned by the well-being and the future of Rwandans will keep supporting forces hell bent on destroying the country and people they claim to care so much about.
